


Skirting Around the Issue

by trash_personified



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Boys in Skirts, Gen, I Don't Even Know, gender neutral fashion, mama agreste as a hobby designer, may resemble crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 12:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9181396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_personified/pseuds/trash_personified
Summary: Adrien has developed a liking for skirts, his parents have issues to work out, and I am way too interested in the fashion side of this show,





	

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what I'm doing here. Unbeta'd. I'm basing Gabe's relationship with his wife on how he treats Adrien. Obviously we don't know what's canon yet so consider it an AU interpretation if you want.

Gabriel and his wife met back in design school. To say that they didn’t like each other at first was a bit of an understatement. He was overbearing and critical of her work, looking down on her as an inferior designer despite their teacher having no problems with her work. He was basically a dick, and she certainly had a sharp enough tongue to keep him at bay. Looking back, it seemed that maybe he hadn’t grown past a child’s attempt at flirting, teasing or pulling hair, and she responded with defensive humour.

But this criticism of her work didn’t end when they got together.

He called her work tasteless and tacky, she called him stuffy and conceited.  It was, all in all, not one of the most respectful relationships in that regard. But their friends could attest that it never spread farther than that, in their personal lives he treated her as if she hung the moon, and she treated him as a puppy with all bark and no bite.

Their fashion careers did eventually take different paths, he worked himself to the bone, creating contacts and pushing his staff, until he became a well-known name in the industry. She continued as she had, creating any whimsical dreams that came to mind, modelling it herself, just for a photo to hang on the wall before the outfits went into storage.

When she fell pregnant, she lacked the time and energy to create, but nothing could take away her will to design, she filled many a sketchbook with her outlandish designs.

Gabriel wasn’t around as much anymore, having to travel for business while she gave birth to their son. He tried to make up for it every time he left, returning with flowers and jewellery, but he always left again not long after.

With baby Adrien to take care of, she didn’t even have time for sketching anymore. She refused to let him be raised by nannies, not when his father was already so absent.

As Adrien grew up, it became much easier. She had always underestimated how fast children grew, seeming to outgrow his clothes in weeks. They went through so many clothes… all the more opportunities for her. Gabriel hadn’t allowed her a budget for making her own designs, but if she used the money for Adrien’s clothes to make things for him instead, she was technically following the rules.

Baby and toddler designing had proven a lot more difficult than the regular kind, with such focus on practicality and no options in silhouettes, but the bright colours and elaborate patterns that her husband so detested looked adorable on her baby. The way he would babble and reach out for them as she tried to dress him, as if they were a new toy for him. He could always put a smile on her face, one that was so rarely present these days.

As Adrien grew, so did the variety of her designs, sometimes he even gave input as to some of his favourite parts so she could personalise them to him. Gabriel had only really noticed around the time Adrien had turned eight.

“What… is this?” he said, his voice heavy with disgust, enough to wipe the bright smile from Adrien’s face.

“I… It… Mama made it for me? Its cool isn’t it? I really like the skirt, its so floofy.”

The look on Gabriel’s face had let him know that it wasn’t… ‘cool.’

He had confronted her later that evening. Adrien could hear both of them yelling in the next room, along with the tearing of fabric. He hadn’t thought mixing patterns was such a bad thing.

She must have won that fight as Adrien continued to model her clothes afterwards, and when he reached his pre-teens, his father had joined in.

Modelling his father’s designs was nowhere near as fun. The lights were hot and bright in his face, and strangers yelled things at him. The clothes were stiff and boring colours, and most importantly, his mother wasn’t there smiling and laughing with him.

* * *

 

Then she wasn’t at home either.

He missed her smile, he missed her hugs, he missed modelling her clothes with her.

A lot of things in the mansion changed when she left. He went from rarely seeing his father, to never seeing him, the portrait of the family in the main foyer was taken down and replaced with a ridiculously morose one, and those clothes of her’s were boxed up and taken away.

Things got better, he was allowed to go to school, he made friends, he rarely found time to miss her at all. Clothing was always interesting at school. While he had to wear his father’s designs, he got to see the variety of things everyone else wore. He liked Marinette’s particularly. Polka-dots and florals were always such fun prints, and especially in pink, he always loved pink.

These feelings really only became significant when Nino took him on a shopping trip with the girls, apparently it was criminal that he’d never been to rue boutique before.

It was innocent at first, a pink skirt that Marinette had wanted to try on.

“Yeah, it looks great, Mari. Really great!” he had stuttered out when she opened the change room, a bright blush matching the skirt. Oh god was that compliment creepy? He had been trying really hard not to be creepy.

“Woah boy,” came Alya’s voice as she exited the next change room over, “If you like it so much why don’t you try it on.”

In hindsight, he realised by the way his friends had laughed that they were joking, at the time though…

“Can I?”

The skirt had fit him too, with such a tiny waist, but his friends had a… slightly different reaction to his mother.

“Legs fo’ dayz” Nino wolf-whistled.

“Is it bad that I’m jealous? Because I’m kind of jealous.”

“We can… share it if you’d like?” Oh god, Marinette why?

But that did end up being the arrangement, his father wouldn’t allow it in his house and Marinette was the same size. They shared the skirt, and the next six they bought that day too.

If Adrien ever felt like wearing one, he’d go over to Marinette’s place before he went out with them and change.

It was a surprisingly good system, and he and Marinette had something in common that he could easily strike up a conversation about.

It went well until the paparazzi got a picture of him in it.

It was minor news, not enough to be printed, and certainly not in more than a few fashion tabloids online, theorizing where Agreste fashions was going with this. But Gabriel, as concerned as always with his public appearance, had seen it.

Adrien could tell by the look on his father’s face when he walked in with his friends, that he was in deep shit.

The door was slammed in Nino’s face as Gabriel begun his rant. Adrien wasn’t too concerned with this. His father’s rants were predictable, usually starting off with something small, cold disapproval over it, then comparing him to his mother and his face slipping into a distasteful drawl, it had always interested Adrien how his father’s jaw could move in such exaggerated rolling motions like that, like he had his mouth full of marbles, rather than just his head.

Nathalie had stopped him before he reached full rant potential, rushing in with some select quotes from major critics, praising Gabriel on taking the stick out of his ass and moving forward with modern fashion trends.

Adrien wasn’t sure how that discussion ended, but a few weeks later, his father was providing him with a few skirts to wear to school. A new line of his father’s had come out, with some very familiar designs that Adrien had thought his father had had burned. He had startled a few times over the next weeks as he heard his mother’s name mentioned, but people were only ever talking about the title of his father’s new line.

 

 


End file.
